1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to techniques for ranking products in response to a search query. In particular, the present invention is related to ranking such products using purchase day based time windows.
2. Background
A search engine is a type of program that may be hosted and executed by a server. A server may execute a search engine to enable users to search for documents in a networked computer system based on search queries that are provided by the users. For instance, the server may match search terms (e.g., keywords and/or key phrases) that are included in a user's search query to metadata associated with documents that are stored in (or otherwise accessible to) the networked computer system. Documents that are retrieved in response to the search query are provided to the user as a search result. The documents are often ranked based on how closely their metadata matches the search terms. For example, the documents may be listed in the search result in an order that corresponds to the rankings of the respective documents. The document having the highest ranking is usually listed first in the search result.
With the rapid growth of electronic commerce (aka “e-commerce), online product search services have emerged as a popular and effective paradigm for customers to find and purchase desired products. Most product search engines today are based on adaptations of search engine relevance models devised for information retrieval. However, while the use of such models may lead to search results that are relevant to a customer's search query, such search results may not identify products that the customer is actually interested in purchasing.